Pushbuttons?
4 March 2010
A story that I wrote will be published in issue 2 of Big Lucks. I wrote the first draft of this in 2003 — I know because it was the night after I saw The Triplets of Belleville — and I’ve added to it and revised it periodically since then, and finally now it’s in a pretty good state, but in all that time I haven’t been able to think of a decent title for it. Don’t think I haven’t tried. So this nice man named Mark at Big Lucks said we want this thing but can you change the title? (I had put some mediocre working title on it.) And I said if only I could. Then I sat there for a long time at night trying to think of a title. I made a list of words that seemed connected to the story, but none of them was any good.
Finally I decided on a method, a kind of ultimatum method. I went to my favorite anonymous message server. This is a place where you type in something that’s on your mind and hit enter, and then you get to see what the person before you wrote. You don’t know who the person was; the next person to use the site will get to see what you wrote, but you don’t know who that person will be either. My idea was to take the random anonymous message I would receive and use words from it to construct a title for this story. I typed in my message and hit enter. Here’s what I got (which I don’t mind sharing, since sharing doesn’t make it any less anonymous):
He Makes me mad.
He likes to push my buttons.
I like him less and less each day.
I wish we were still friends.
Well, it could be worse. On the other hand, it could be better. “Wish” stands out, but a little thought convinced me that no good title could possible include this word. “Push like Mad”? “Less Makes Less”? “Day Friends”?
Let’s face it, they are not great words to make a title out of, but at least fruitlessly rearranging them was more fun than fruitlessly rearranging words I had thought of myself. Eventually I decided it would be okay to combine two of the words into a single word, and came up with “Day like Pushbuttons.” Which isn’t bad. Doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the story, but has the right feel.
So my story tentatively entitled “Day like Pushbuttons” will appear in Big Lucks. It will be out in May I think.
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